Never mind that much of the country was doing the exact same thing, downplaying politics, spirituality, and ethics to pony up for a national gold rush. American writers and intellectuals expected university presidents to stand above the fray. Many such academics and members of the press had gone to college during the 1960s and ’70s, when several notable figures helped shape the image of the activist, idealistic university president. Yale had Kingman Brewster, whose passionate rhetoric about social justice helped prevent the outbreak of violence on a simmering campus. At Notre Dame, Theodore Hesburgh transformed a sleepy, intellectual backwater of a university into a nationally respected institution. As president of the University of California system, Clark Kerr wove a motley collection of colleges and universities into probably the finest state university system in the country, until he was ousted by then-governor Ronald Reagan for being too tolerant of left-wing dissent. Somewhat earlier, Robert Hutchins pioneered a rigorous “great books” curriculum at the University of Chicago, abolished the football team, and criticized American moral hypocrisy. And at Harvard itself, James Conant had crusaded against pre-war isolationism, while Derek Bok fought to prevent the university from retreating into itself after the shock of Vietnam.
By Rudenstine’s time, the university president had become a potent symbol in the American imagination, a loftier figure than the politician or businessman. He—and it was almost always a man—was wise enough to know about politics, moral enough to pronounce upon current affairs, but generally humble enough not to throw his hat into the political ring. (Although if he wanted to, he could: Woodrow Wilson and Dwight D. Eisenhower were the presidents of Princeton and Columbia before they were presidents of the United States.) In fact, his self-imposed seclusion gave him the clarity and perspective to remark upon the world around him. University presidents had become secular preachers, using their podiums to spread the gospel of education. “Don’t just look at our classrooms,” they said in effect. “Look at us.” And Americans disillusioned with their political leadership, Americans whose religious leaders often disappointed them as well, did just that. The mission of a university president was not just to educate his students, but to better American society itself, to speak out from his privileged perch, untainted by the seductions and corruptions of American capitalism, and remind Americans of what was noble about their country at a time when the nation seemed to have lost its self-confidence.
In other circumstances, Neil Rudenstine would have loved to play the role of public intellectual. By birth, training, and inclination he was a man who cared deeply about social justice. But there was truth to the charge that his fiduciary obligations had squelched his ability to speak on issues of public import. Wealthy alumni tended to be conservative, and it made no sense to risk offending the very people you were simultaneously asking for money. Rudenstine may have been in love with poetry, but he was no bleeding-heart romantic.
And there was another reason why Rudenstine couldn’t speak out with the ease of his predecessors: Harvard’s ethnic composition had changed dramatically, making political pronouncements a much dicier matter. After World War II, Harvard had opened itself up to students of different regions, religions, and, to a lesser extent, social classes. Even more dramatically, the social upheaval of the sixties compelled the university to open its gates to underprivileged groups it had long excluded. Women and African Americans came first, followed by Asian Americans and Latinos. Under Derek Bok, the number of foreign students had begun to grow, particularly in the graduate schools, and that trend continued under Rudenstine. And the gay rights movement meant that another group that had long existed on campus gradually made itself both visible and vocal. In the 1920s, Harvard had a secret kangaroo court that drummed suspected homosexuals out of the university; by the late 1990s, gay and bisexual students were holding public “kiss-ins” on the Harvard campus.
All of these groups carried with them diverse life experiences and perspectives that could not possibly fit under a single political umbrella, and the president who dared to venture into political pronouncements now ran a much greater chance of offending his student body than when that student body consisted of khaki-wearing white men from New England. Perhaps the only values that could include all these new citizens of the university were those that Harvard had long insisted upon: a reverence for scholarship, tolerance of dissent, and a belief in the freedom of speech. Derek Bok had argued that a university president should speak out only on issues that had a direct impact on higher education, and when he said anything at all, Rudenstine followed his predecessor’s model. Some saw it as a retreat, others as an affirmation of central principles, an attempt to strike a balance between total isolation from the outside world and total immersion in it.
But there was one issue that Rudenstine refused to be quiet about: race in America. Maybe because of his working-class background, Rudenstine felt a genuine empathy for the victims of racial discrimination. That was why he successfully spoke out against a proposed memorial to Harvard’s Confederate dead—there already existed a memorial for Harvard’s Union dead—and that was why he vigorously advocated for affirmative action.
Since the 1970s Harvard had compiled a record of support for the policy of incorporating race as a factor in university admissions. In the famous 1978 Supreme Court Bakke case, Justice Lewis Powell had cited Harvard’s admissions policy as a model of a system that incorporated affirmative action in a socially valuable and legally tenable way. Derek Bok vigorously championed affirmative action, co-authoring an influential 1988 book called The Shape of the River, which defended the concept. Rudenstine went even further. In 1996, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned racial preferences at the University of Texas, Rudenstine publicly criticized the ruling. Affirmative action was not simply about helping blacks get into college, he said. Because all students learned from a socially and ethnically diverse campus, affirmative action was in the best interest of all the university’s citizens, regardless of their skin color. In 1997, Rudenstine helped author a public statement supporting race, gender, and ethnicity as factors in admissions, which was signed by sixty-one other university presidents. When criticized by some alumni, Rudenstine conceded that the mean SAT score of minority students was indeed lower than that of the average Harvard student. But, he noted, it was higher than that of the average alumni child. That comeback tended to silence the critics.
Of all the places where Rudenstine showed his commitment to civil rights, none was more favored than the Department of Afro-American Studies, or Af-Am, as it was known. Af-Am was only about twenty years old when Rudenstine arrived. Its creation had come as a result of student protest in 1969. Black students had demanded it, and, more as political necessity than intellectual imperative, Harvard had agreed to it. But Af-Am had never really prospered at Harvard. Few students “concentrated”—Harvard’s term for majored—in Afro-American studies. The field was mostly of interest to black students, and many blacks who had made it to Harvard were more concerned with acquiring the keys to a successful career than they were with academic self-exploration. Afro-American studies, they worried, would marginalize them when it came time to enter the job market. So they majored in economics and government, subjects that they knew prospective employers would regard with approval.
It was equally hard to find professors to staff the department. Scholars in the field were usually African American, but the number of black Ph.D.s in academia was small, and the number of black Ph.D.s Harvard considered good enough to tenure was even smaller. By the late 1980s, Harvard’s department of Afro-American Studies contained only one tenured professor—and he was white.
For Harvard, the situation was untenable and potentially embarrassing, particularly at a time when some exciting work was happening in the field of African American studies. So, in 1990, Derek Bok and his FAS dean, economist Henry Rosovsky, hired the man who was doing much of that work: a young, Yale-trained scholar named Henry Louis Gates, Jr. �
�Skip” Gates, as he was known, came from Duke University, in North Carolina, along with his longtime intellectual partner, a philosopher named K. Anthony Appiah. Their mandate was to revitalize a moribund department. But they couldn’t have done it without the support of incoming president Neil Rudenstine, and that they had in abundance. Rudenstine gave them the resources—money, staff, lavish new offices right across Quincy Street from the Yard—to fulfill their mandate. Rudenstine and Gates recruited other well-known scholars such as the sociologist William Julius Wilson, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and, from Princeton, a rising star in philosophy and religion named Cornel West. All told, Rudenstine appointed more than thirty senior and junior black faculty members to Harvard—more than had been hired in the 355 years before he became president.
Not everyone approved. Some faculty members whispered that a department that still had very few concentrators, maybe twenty students a year, didn’t merit so much money and attention. They sniped that the players on Gates’s “dream team,” as the press began to refer to the Af-Am faculty, all seemed to have done their best work before they came to Harvard. And the detractors resented Gates’ access to the president. If, say, the FAS dean—at the time a chemist named Jeremy Knowles—turned down a financial request from Gates, Gates would just pick up the phone and call Rudenstine. To his critics, this state of affairs reinforced the image of Rudenstine as a weak, easily manipulated president. It didn’t matter that he actually wanted to fund Af-Am; he was being played. Rudenstine, however, wasn’t swayed by the naysayers and the gossip. For him, and for Skip Gates, it mattered only that a once-moribund department was now alive and kicking, attracting national attention to Harvard.
Af-Am was Rudenstine’s major academic achievement, but it wasn’t his only one. Rudenstine also brokered a final resolution to a century-old Harvard problem: the integration of its sister school, Radcliffe College. Ever since Radcliffe’s founding in 1879—when it was called the Harvard Annex—the women’s college maintained an awkward relationship to Harvard, its students increasingly folded into Harvard but its administration largely separate. Women moved into the Harvard houses in the early 1970s, but until 1999 their diplomas still said “Radcliffe.” Numerous presidents before Rudenstine had tried and failed to deal with the Radcliffe problem, but Rudenstine negotiated a delicate arrangement by which Harvard would absorb Radcliffe’s nine-figure endowment while transforming the college into a think tank for women’s studies. Like raising money, it was an unglamorous task, harder to effect than it appeared.
But none of this changed Rudenstine’s image; his breakdown and his fundraising ensured that. And in a strange way, the more successful the fundraising was, the more Harvardians grew dissatisfied with their president. Even now there is a certain Yankee primness to much of the Harvard community, and while its members wanted their university to be rich, and wanted to enjoy the benefits of that wealth, they didn’t want the outside world to pay quite so much attention to it. Given the financial headlines, that hope was unrealistic. As the stock market soared, Harvard’s endowment rose to $10 billion, then $15 billion, and kept going. Harvard’s money managers were earning around $20 million annually, about one hundred times what one of the best-paid professors was making. Even those who liked Rudenstine began to worry that the university had grown more concerned with money than with scholarship. “Harvard’s goal is to die with the most amount of money,” said law professor Alan Dershowitz at the time. “That should not be the goal.”
More disturbing but less remarked upon was the way the money lust was trickling down to every level of the university. Beginning in the early 1990s, a number of Harvard students became involved in criminal or allegedly criminal activity. In 1991 and 1992, two students pilfered more than $125,000 from an annual ice-skating charity benefit organized by Eliot House, one of the student residences. In 1995, several undergraduates stole thousands of dollars from the Harvard Yearbook Society and the Krokodiloes, a student singing group. In 1997, another student plundered almost $8,000 from the Currier House treasury. And in 2001, two members of the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, a drama club, embezzled almost $100,000 from the group. One spent his money on drugs and home electronics. The other blew her share on shopping sprees and spa visits.
The Harvard administration dealt firmly with each incident. But with so much money floating around, was it really surprising that a few students would try to pluck some from the air? Was no one at Harvard concerned by the fact that student organizations could be so wealthy that their participants could embezzle a six-figure sum in the belief that no one would notice a missing hundred grand?
And the faculty didn’t seem much better. Being a tenured faculty member at Harvard brought enormous prestige and the opportunity to make considerably more money from outside sources than one could earn from teaching. Economics and business professors snapped up lucrative consulting deals with banks and corporations. Law professors marketed their expertise in much the same way, consulting on cases in exchange for substantial fees. Professors of science and medicine maneuvered to steer their research in the direction of drug and biotech companies.
At the business school, Suzanne Wetlaufer, the editor of the Harvard Business Review, took this merging of Harvard and commerce to an inevitable extreme. While interviewing Jack Welch for the magazine in late 2001, Wetlaufer commenced an affair with the General Electric chief executive. Welch left his wife and Wetlaufer left her job, but the moral of the story was inescapable: Harvard had, quite literally, crawled into bed with corporate America.
Teaching at Harvard enabled you to do other things: write op-eds for the New York Times, get grants from friends in high places, testify before Congress, and land a job in the White House. It was all too easy to view teaching as a nagging obligation. “The nemesis of Harvard is its reputation,” lamented Michael Ignatieff, a professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School. “We’re much too grand to do what we’re supposed to do—teach.”
That lack of passion for teaching on the part of many Harvard professors is a chronic problem for the university. The culture of Harvard College in particular reflects this pedagogical ennui. At many of Harvard’s competitors, such as Yale and Princeton, professors who teach a lecture course must also teach a discussion section, a smaller weekly meeting with ten or fifteen students instead of the dozens or hundreds enrolled for the twice-weekly lecture. At Harvard, graduate students do most of the hands-on teaching, leading sections and grading papers and exams. Many of those graduate students, known as teaching fellows, are committed, excellent teachers. Many, however, are not, with their skills in English fluctuating as widely as their knowledge of their subjects. But good or bad, the chance to interact with graduate students is not why so many high school students apply to Harvard every year. The lack of contact with their professors is a shock to many entering students and a constant complaint of the rest. In fact, a late-1990s survey of Ivy League newspapers found that Harvard students had the highest level of dissatisfaction with their education of any Ivy League students.
Student dissatisfaction contributed to the gnawing concern that, although Harvard’s fame was unequalled, other schools offered an education as good or better. Princeton, Yale, and New York University were all doing an excellent job of teaching undergrads. But perhaps most worrisome was Stanford. The Palo Alto, California, university was younger than Harvard and seemed to be riding the wave of American culture. It had close connections to the entrepreneurs and billionaires of nearby Silicon Valley, creating a steady back-and-forth of energy, ideas, and money. In 2001, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave Stanford $400 million, the largest gift ever given to higher education. Stanford was using its new money to pursue cutting-edge scientific research that would in turn earn still more cash for the university. The affirmation of Stanford’s cultural arrival came when Chelsea Clinton rejected the Ivy League for Palo Alto. In the past, a president’s child would surely have stayed east, but Clinton’s decision
to head to the West Coast reflected a new sense of cultural liberation. To join the elite, you didn’t have to go to Harvard anymore.
Little of this was the fault of Neil Rudenstine, or at least his fault alone; the crisis in Harvard’s undergraduate education had been a long time in the making. Nevertheless, Rudenstine was the man in charge, and rather than attend to these increasingly urgent questions, he was off raising money. The students barely saw their president. “Rudenstine knows more about the interests of Harvard’s top donors than about the needs of the Harvard undergraduates,” editorialized the Harvard Crimson, the campus daily. On the announcement of his resignation in May 2000, the Crimson declared that “Rudenstine’s tenure has stripped Harvard of strong leadership in the presidency and equipped the University with a far quieter voice in American society than his predecessors enjoyed…. The University has receded to the shadows of ivy tower and Ivy League obscurity.”
Over the course of the twentieth century, Harvard presidents served an average of about twenty years. Neil Rudenstine would serve the shortest stint of any Harvard president since before the Civil War. Some said that that was because of his apparently gentle constitution; others argued that the president’s job had simply become too grueling for anyone to hold it for very long—or even want to. In any event, Rudenstine had told Harvard that he wanted to leave, and Harvard didn’t exactly put up a fight.
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